Advance praise for

THIS RED LINE GOES STRAIGHT TO YOUR HEART

“Distinctive…The different perspectives are truly poetic and at times heartbreaking. Playing with time is so difficult and I’m happy to say in This Red Line it soars.”

—Deepa Mehta, filmmaker

“Anand illustrates the unknowability of love and other people and the futility of logic and science when it comes to the human heart. The result is a beautiful experiment that free falls through metaphors and anecdotes, and delivers us truths that are like rare butterflies.”

—Heather O’Neill, author of Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Lonely Hearts Hotel

“I loved this book for its lyricism, ideas, brilliant refusal of symmetry. I’ve never read anything like it.”

—Kate Harris, author of Lands of Lost Borders

“Wondrously and elegantly written in language that astonishes. This is an important book: an emotional and intellectual tour de force.”

—Jane Urquhart, author of the The Stone Carvers and The Night Stages

“An electrical storm of a book. Sweeping, gorgeous, bold, and piercing. As vivid and uneasy as life itself.”

—Claudia Dey, author of Heartbreaker and Stunt

“More than a memoir, this is a meditation on history, family and identity and the heartbeat of the cosmos itself. This Red Line…is erudite, honest, thought-provoking, and immensely readable. I found it hard to put it down.”

—Olive Senior, author of The Pain Tree

“Madhur Anand shows us how to use science in the service of art, and art as a tool for science, but more than that, she uses the two together to reveal the universals we all suffer by telling us the story of her very particular family.”

—Lee Smolin, founding faculty member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and author of The Life of the Cosmos

“A stunning hybrid of family history, personal narrative, and political archive. This is a book I wish I could give to my great-grandparents. I already know I will reread it to fill my heart and sharpen my senses.”

—Rudrapriya Rathore, writer and critic

“ ‘I remember the first time I looked through a kaleidoscope,’ Madhur Anand writes in this many-sided memoir, which you don’t so much read as rotate, entranced by the patterns that change almost from sentence to sentence, each like a mirror. The patterns are infinite. They are also deeply memorable.”

—Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, author of Selected Poems and Translations/NYRB Poets and History of Indian Literature in English

“An epic story set inside the complexities of culture and filled with characters whom you love as if they were your own family. Details of sound and sight, taste and smell rise from the page. A truly wondrous book.”

—Barb Minett, founder of The Bookshelf